


If We Can Live Through This (We Can Do Anything)

by SylphOfPaperPlanes



Category: Sky High (2005)
Genre: Graduation, High School, M/M, Mutual Pining, POV Alternating, Vignettes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-09
Updated: 2021-02-12
Packaged: 2021-03-15 00:27:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,502
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29304984
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylphOfPaperPlanes/pseuds/SylphOfPaperPlanes
Summary: Graduating high school is hard. Graduating out into the world of heroes is harder.But trying to do either while you're slowly falling in love with your best friend is like trying to save the world all over again.
Relationships: Warren Peace/Will Stronghold
Comments: 6
Kudos: 22





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hey all! I've been working on this fic on and off since my senior year of high school, and I thought that 4 years was plenty of time to let this simmer before sending the first chapter of this passion project out into the world. (And hey, gearing up for graduating college is as good a time as any to revisit this wonderful, wonderful movie.) I'll update when I can around thesis work, but definitely wanted to finally get some of this out into the world.
> 
> [Oh, and here's a nifty little Spotify playlist to accompany the fic! ](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/69WYEu3akYoMvvZfzx3GFU?si=1j0Eq6d1SMicPnrIj0qnOA/)

The cheap fabric of the tablecloth is cold under Warren’s fingertips. He’s tapping out a counterbeat to the obnoxious bass of the music pumping out through the gym speakers, and he can feel the islands of heat his hand leaves behind. If he closes his eyes, he can see every candle flickering in the centerpieces, but for now they’re on the edge of his awareness.

He’d sworn off school dances since that fateful homecoming back in freshman year. There was already too much pomp and circumstance to the whole affair without the threat of supervillains following his newfound friends around every corner like they were prone to do.

Still, his whole damn friend group insisted he go, both because they all wanted to try and enjoy the evening together and that, without him, the group would have an odd number of people. He’s figuring it’s mostly the latter, with how they’re all on the dance floor after he insisted that he doesn’t dance, thank you very much. He doesn't know how he ended up sticking around these people so long, he thinks as he watches them scream-sing along with the group and whatever song is blasting over the speakers. (Or, more accurately, he amends, he doesn't know how they were willing to stick around him and all of his brooding bullshit.) Still, he can't help but smile at the way that bunch of misfits-turned heroes look over to him every few minutes to check on him, haven't left him in the dust for some other charity case.

“Looks like Freak Show over there decided to grace the prom with his presence,” someone says from somewhere behind him, and he just rolls his eyes and reaches into the pocket of his suit jacket for the well-worn paperback that he told himself he wouldn’t need. He knows the usual suspects of who'd be heckling him, and they're not worth the effort of a response. Not when he's so close to never having to see a single one of them again.

“Hey, back off, guys.”

That voice is familiar. Way, way too familiar, and oh great, the wonderful Will Stronghold is standing up to high school bullies for him. He tries to hold back an even more intense eye roll as he opens the book up to where he dog-eared the page. Sure, he’s read _Catcher in the Rye_ plenty of times, but he always liked this part, the one where—

“Well, well, if it isn’t the Stronghold poster boy protecting his pet project. You really think you’ll be able to, what, hug the evil out of him? It’s in his fucking blood.”

He has to focus on not setting the table on fire, taking deep breaths and doing the mindfulness crap that Layla pushes on him and Will like it’ll change their lives. (Part of him misses the calm of the anti-power field in the detention room, where his skin felt cold and the only heat came from the fluorescents. The rest of him likes to remind that one small part that he’s an almost-adult that has one foot out the door of high school, and only fucking losers would want to go back, especially to detention.)

He feigns ignorance, pretends he never heard any of this while his fingertips are starting to drum ashy spots into the tablecloth. Stronghold will diffuse the situation as he always does, with some well-placed comments about how everyone should be respected or how we should all rise to the occasions that we create. Something that sounds like a shitty moral at the end of one of the comic books where the good guy always wins and the villain is sentenced to four consecutive life sentences.

But when he hears the sound of a punch connecting, he’s up and out of his seat in a second to see a student out cold while Will’s still got his fists in front of him, sizing up five others.

“What, you fighting for your boyfriend’s honor, Stronghold?” one of them says with a nod in Warren’s direction, and Warren hesitates with one hand on the back of his chair. There’d been plenty of rumors, especially with the on-again-off-again nature of Will and Layla’s relationship, but at least the rest of the student body had the decency to keep it behind their backs. He presses his nails into his palm, but he can feel the heat building, up and up his wrists and arms.

“Wonder how the Commander and Jetstream feel about their golden child getting it on with—”

Suddenly, the guy’s slumped on the ground, the collar of his shirt still smouldering from a fireball that Warren threw before he could think about it. He can feel the aftershocks hammering through his veins, the steam rising off the cuffs of his sleeves, the way his heart is thrumming like the wind through a forest fire.

Will looks over his shoulder at Warren with wide eyes, but there’s pride there.

Yeah, he might be going back to detention.

But it’ll be worth it.

* * *

  
Will’s in his own personal purgatory, he thinks.

Layla’s house is godawful, no matter how you look at it. Nobody in their right mind would turn off the AC in the first hellish days of the summer, even under the guise of being ecologically sustainable or something. Will always insists that they hang out at his house where his parents like to keep the entire place cool come hell or high water. (But that might just be Dr. Cold’s freeze ray in the Sanctum; it’s been on the fritz again. The last time it happened, their entire first floor was covered in frost for a week.)

This time though, Layla had invited Will and Warren over for a last minute review session before finals started, and there was no excusing himself out of this one with how his grades in Mad Science have been looking as the year dragged on. It’s not like he’ll fail the year if he flunks this test, but it’d be better for everyone involved if his parents saw something other than an F on his report card after the stunt he pulled the night before and the subsequent fallout. So now, the day after prom—a day that _should_ be for relaxing and riding out a hangover he doesn't have—he’s sitting in the Williams’ living room that feels like a rainforest crammed into the same space as the coffee table and sofas. He’s trying to ignore the sweat that’s building up along his hairline.

Add insult to injury, all the plants in the house feel it necessary to try and help out. The fern next to the couch keeps tapping answers on the review sheet in front of him, even though it’s clearly wrong, because everyone knows giant ants are susceptible to gamma radiation, not ultraviolet. Warren had gotten up to go get something to drink from the kitchen a few minutes before, and Will can hear him grumbling at the plants that are trying to be helpful every now and again.

“Villain has the mayor trapped in a crystal,” Layla reads from one of the flashcards in front of her, held up by an orchid. Her hair’s down and she doesn’t seem to be affected by the heat, but a small palm frond is fanning her, so Will doesn’t think it’s a fair comparison. When Warren showed up half an hour ago, he’d dropped his school bag and flopped onto the couch in a mess of long limbs and dark clothing. " _‘S awful ‘n here_ ," he mumbled into a throw pillow, and when the kid who deals with literal fire in his veins complains about the heat, you know you’re in a new ring of hell.

“What do you do?” Layla asks.

Shit. Studying for finals. Right.

“What type of crystal?”

“Unknown.”

“Magical or scientific?”

“Magical.”

Will’s quiet for a second while he goes through every protocol he’s been taught over the past four years. The fern is trying to sneak the pencil from his hand, and he tucks it behind his ear to keep it out of reach. He doesn’t know if the crystal is a curse or a spell, but he remembers something from History of Heroes about a spellcaster who could do this exact same thing, but not without a ritual...

“Attack the villain to break his concentration,” he finally says, and yeah, it makes more sense to him now that it’s out loud.

“Unless it’s something like The Sorceress did back in the eighties,” Will hears from the next room over, and fuck, Warren’s right. “If it’s a hex, then you need to get the command word from the villain or the mayor’s going to be the next permanent exhibit at the Maxville Museum of Natural History.” He says it with a sing-song-y trill, and Will knows without seeing that his smirk is a mile wide.

Warren steps out from the kitchen, holding a glass full of ice by the rim, probably so that the heat of his hand doesn’t melt it all immediately. His hair’s piled on top of his head in a messy bun, and Jesus, he should probably get it redone sometime before graduation, because the red streaks are fading into an orange-y auburn from where they’re peeking out from the tangle held back in a hair tie. His chin is lifted slightly in the way that means that he knows he’s right and he’s proud of it, waiting for the other side to concede.

Instead, when he sits on the floor next to him, Will squints at the glass that Warren’s still holding. “I thought you said you were going to get us lemonade.”

“Said I was going to get something for myself, what do I look like, your waiter?” he says as he puts an ice cube in his mouth. His breath is instantly a bellow of steam, but he smiles around the cold. “‘Sides, I was going to, until the basil on the counter started to get violent.”

Will catches Layla murmuring “Not again” before running into the kitchen. Will’s witnessed plenty of tantrums from plants in this house that can’t stand the heat and it always ends in a miniature horticultural therapy session.

(Or that one time when the begonias in the backyard ended up being disguised alien flora that attacked his face back when he was nine. He doesn’t like to think about that too much.)

“Come on, Stronghold,” Warren says around another rapidly melting ice cube, the first one long gone. His gaze is intense and expectant and for a split second, Will swears he can feel the chill of his breath in the air, but then Warren turns away and the moment’s gone. He plucks the flashcards from the orchid’s grasp and flips through a few. “If you can’t tell a spell from a hex, I’m scared to see what else you need to catch up on.”

He knows he needs to study, to think about the ways that photon blasts interact with other powers or whatever, but all he can do is appreciate the moment while he has it, notice the way Warren's fidgeting with the bracelets at his wrists, the way he seems so much more himself in a t-shirt and jeans than the tux from the night before. There are going to be the moments he misses, just getting to _be_ around the people he cares about and who care about him, no matter how much of a facade they put up to say otherwise. 

"Ground control to Stronghold? Space cadets aren't going to pass finals, unless you're daydreaming about some sick cheating scheme."

Something seems to shift in Will’s chest when Warren smiles, and _oh_.


	2. Chapter 2

Warren doesn’t have the ability to breathe underwater, but he still takes comfort in the bottom of the swimming pool. The lights of the party above move with blurry, wavering sound on the other side of the surface. His back’s against the plastic lining of the floor and the chlorine stopped stinging his eyes a while ago. He likes the quiet, the calm, the moment that he can have where his skin doesn’t feel like it’s a thousand degrees.

When he was younger, before his hands started bursting into flames, he loved to swim. He liked to imagine that once he was older, in the nebulous world of the future, he’d grow gills and fins and be able to swim away from whatever seemed to loom large and unknown around corners. But, because karma’s a bitch and genetics are more of the same, he woke up on his thirteenth birthday covered in fire, and he couldn’t swim away from that one. 

Eventually, when his lungs start burning for air like a flame burns for oxygen, he pushes his way up to the surface, where voices suddenly become crystal clear and lights turn into strings of bulbs rather than mysterious points of yellow against the darkened sky.

He can see almost everyone else nearby on the porch, sitting around the fire pit. Magenta’s holding court, with her arms around Zach and Ethan while Layla is watching the ivy on the side of the house grow under her fingertips. Inside, he can hear the graduation party roaring on with all the people that don’t matter singing along with top 40 hits. Will is probably in there, he thinks, since it’s his graduation party, after all. 

Okay, he amends his earlier statement: Everyone that doesn’t matter is inside, and also Will.

He ducks under the surface again, and lets the world go away for the few minutes that he can hold his breath.

It’s not that he’s trying to be anti-social, though it almost always appears to be his modus operandi. Earlier, they’d gotten him to heat the pool until it bubbled like a hot tub, and he’d done it just to get everyone to stop staring at him expectantly. The thing Warren’s learned over the years, the second you give people what they want, they’ll stop paying attention.

The water had long since lost its heat to the cool evening and its inhabitants had all fled at the call that the pizza had arrived. He was planning on following in a few minutes, but got caught up in the blissful moment of calm that he hadn’t thought he’d have to fight for.

When Will had asked him to go to a graduation party, he expected ten people, tops, and that included Will’s parents (who are still the most menacing people on the planet to a son of a villain, and even though he hasn’t seen them in the crush of the party, he feels like they’ve been watching and judging him the entire evening). Instead, his scowl grew deeper as he had to walk through the rooms he thought he knew well, but looked like another dimension when they were packed with people he never learned the names of over the years. He heard his name whispered with the occasional snide comment while he walked past, and pretty much the only thing that kept him from burning the place down with all of them inside was that he’d just be proving the Commander right. He wasn’t to be trusted in any way, shape, or form.

His inner monologuing—residual villainy, he thinks—is interrupted by a pair of feet splashing in, like someone’s sitting on the edge.

Well shit.

It’s likely that whoever is sitting on the edge doesn’t see him in the dark water, and the last thing he wants to do is get out and seem like any more of a creep than everyone already thinks he is. 

However, the building pressure in his lungs thinks otherwise.

He breaks the surface in probably the least graceful way, with a heaving deep breath, hair still floating around his shoulders. 

He hears Will shout in surprise, and yep, Warren thinks it might have been better just to drown than to turn around and see the man of the hour with his obnoxious red, white, and blue swim trunks, solo cup in hand.

He opens his mouth to try and make small talk, mention how great the party is or whatever teenagers are supposed to chat about, when Will blurts out “You look like a mermaid.”

Which, yeah, Okay, now Warren’s not the only one who seems stupid, at least.

“Well, thank you very much, Stronghold.”

“No uh, you know with your hair is all splayed out in the water? You’re a mermaid like that. But a dude. Manly and stuff. A merman? Manmaid.”

“You’re drunk.” Warren says it with apathy, but he’s still keeping an eye on how close he is to the edge and how far he’s leaning over the water. It takes a lot to get Will Stronghold drunk, but when he is...

“Yeah, kinda,” Will concedes with a shrug, but Warren’s still watching the way the motion leaves him slightly unbalanced. He’s not letting the shining star of Sky High’s senior class drown  a week and a half before graduation . “Never lasts long though. I’ll probably be good to clean all this shit up later.”

Warren moves closer to the edge, because fuck, if Will’s going into the water, he’s going to have to haul him out, isn’t he. He feels his hair start to stick to his back as he leaves the deep end and his skin is exposed to the air. The warmth deep in his chest spreads out, through his shoulders and fingertips to make up for the heat lost to the evening. So much for being a manmaid. 

He hasn’t seen Will drunk too many times, but Warren knows he can get hyperfocused. It only takes him snapping a few times—fingertips too wet to spark with the motion—to get his attention back. “My eyes are up here,” he says jokingly, but he doesn’t miss the spot of color high on Will’s cheeks when he blinks out of it.

There’s a long moment of awkward silence, with Warren standing in the shallows, arms crossed over his chest while Will is intently studying the indents his hand left in his plastic cup.

"I can't believe you got your parents to agree to this," Warren says with a gesture to the house packed with students, for lack of anything else to talk about.

"Huh? Yeah. I, uh, totally got their permission to throw the rager of the century. ‘Specially after the last one led to Gwen trying to rule the world."

"So you didn't want to invite the entire student body to your house." He deadpans.

"I only invited you guys," Will confirms, tilting his head back toward the fire pit. "But Zach mentioned it to some of the underclassmen and Ethan wanted to invite the chess club, and how big can a party get if you're inviting a  _ chess club _ —"

Will cuts himself off with a series of frustrated hand gestures as though they explained the rest of the story, and let one hand rest at the back of his neck like he’s embarrassed. It’s a weird relief to hear that Will’s as far out of his depth as Warren is with all these people. 

“What type of punishment are we looking at here? Slap on the wrist or crucifixion?”

“A slap on the wrist’ll probably shatter my entire arm,” Will mumbles while staring at his toes through the water, and okay, he didn’t answer the question, his response was more than enough.

“I’m helping you clean up, then.”

“No, no you aren’t. Metabolism and stuff. I’ll be good by then.” He goes to make another gesture to himself, but then suddenly he’s reeling and Warren’s reaching out to grab him by the arm and—

Somehow, they end up with both of Warren’s hands on Will’s arms, holding him back on his perch on the edge of the deck. Will’s leaned all the way forward, a hand on Warren’s shoulder to balance himself, forehead half an inch from the other’s. All Warren can focus on is the way Stronghold’s eyes are wide and bright and hazel, the soft flush on his cheeks over fading freckles, the cheap beer on his breath mingling with the sharp bite of chlorine. It’s a long minute of that, unsteady hands holding each other in stasis. He watches Will part his lips, like he’s going to say something, going to do something that’ll fuck up whatever balance they’ve been holding themselves in. 

He pushes Will flat back on his back, away from the water, like he should have done immediately. Warren hoists himself out of the pool, grabs his shirt from the back of a nearby lounge chair, and drains the last of Stronghold’s drink for his troubles. 

He doesn’t look back, doesn’t say anything, just leaves the party and its sounds and its lights because he knows the second he thinks on it too long, he’s done for.

**Author's Note:**

> I have a rough outline for how the rest of this is going to go (and most of the next chapter written!) but I would love to hear from y'all about what you'd like to see in the future of this fic! I promise there will be angst and pining aplenty.


End file.
